Cruising on other people’s work
I love it when other people do my work for me. For example, I needed to store a few random settings in a Grails app, such as the last time a service polled an external resource. So I went to the main Grails Plugin site and, sure enough, someone else has already written a Grails Settings plugin. It needs a few enhancements to do what I want, but it’s better than starting from scratch. While I was perusing the plugin list, I found a few others that can replace features I had started to sketch out (like Taggable) and was inspired by yet others that would let me easily add features that I hadn’t thought of before (like Commentable and Sparkline).
Another example is yet another good post by my friend and coworker Jeff Erikson detailing his research into problems with Grails config options getting wiped during integration tests. I had been meaning to write up a note about how the GrailsUnitTestCase class hides the true config settings, so you don’t want to accidentally use it in integration tests. Jeff took my little tip a lot farther with his post. Thanks, Jeff!
